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Geelong Home Brew Club

Month: June 2018

What am I doing?

I am making some delicious, crystal clear, sparkling plum cider.

Why am I doing it?

I don’t remember ever having Plum Cider, so why not make some?
Plus, I don’t make much cider. The stuff I do make is nearly always apple cider and it is nearly always working with other people and not as a solo effort.

What am I making it with?

There is a Chinese Plum tree in my yard that produces a modest amount of fruit each year. Sometimes I get to harvest those fruit before the hoards of birds and bats consume them all.
Last year was one of the years that I managed to get a harvest in.

I ended up with about six shopping bags of fruit and a desire to make something from them.

I picked up some cider yeast and borrowed a sausage mincer and cider press. My old glass fermenters were pulled out of storage for their first use and I began wistfully looking at my calendar for a free afternoon.

How am I making it?

The outline was simple (long, but simple):

Remove the pits from the fruit.

Put the flesh through the sausage mincer.

Put the mince in the cider press and make some delicious plum juice in a plastic fermenter.

Maybe dilute the juice down a bit.

Add some potassium metabisulfite (precaution after the great lemonade explosion of 2017).